How to Harvest and Store Dry Beans

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This year, I stored a few of my own dry beans, and while harvesting them was not my favorite chore, I love the idea of having them on hand for winter soups.

Beans are an awesome source of vegetable protein, and once you get them out of the pod, they are so super easy to put up. They make for a really cost-effective crop you can enjoy through the winter.

Dry Beans are ready to harvest when the skin is paper thin, and you can shake the pod and hear a rattling sound. You will have to remove the beans from the pod–which you can do by splitting them open and removing them by hand, or you can turn the whole plant upside down in a bucket and bang it against the side, causing the beans to spill out into the bottom of the bucket. {You can throw the skin right back into your compost pile.}

After you get all of the beans out of the pod, the beans need to be cleaned and sorted. If the beans are split open, they need to be weeded out of the “store for winter” pile. To clean them, you can just use a blow dryer and blow off the debris. {If the beans are still soft, spread them on a cookie tray and allow them to dry a little longer.} Before you store them, freeze the beans overnight to kill any tiny bugs that might be still lurking.

To store dried beans, just place them in an airtight container {I think canning jars with a latch lid work awesome} and keep them in a cool, dry place away from sunlight.

Do you store DRY beans for the winter? What do you use them for?

~Mavis

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Comments

I grew a ton of dry beans this year for the first time and I’ve been waiting to see you post on how yours did! I also grew Tiger’s Eye and Calypso from Botanical Interests, as well as 3 other heirloom varieties, pintos and Horto Semi-bush (otherwise known as cranberry beans). So far they have been my favorite thing I’ve grown! I didn’t wait until the plants completely died off to start picking the dry pods and that seems to have been an okay thing, as quite a few of my beans have starting putting on a second crop! One of my varieties was a pole bean and that was the exception as the plants are just completely dying now that the bean pods have dried. I’ve been shelling them onto food dehydrator trays with the herb insert and have them tucked away in a corner in my living room to continue their drying. I can’t wait to see all my jars of dried beans lined up on a shelf!

I was wanting to grow pinto beans to see if they were any better than the ones I buy in the store. I know home grown produce is WAY better than store bought, but since the beans have to dry on the bush and not picked prematurely, I didn’t know if they would be any better or not. Anyway, to the point. I have not seen any pinto bean “seed” – at least not the heirloom kind. I’ve seen that Seed Savers Exchange has pinto “cooking” beans and it was confusing to me that you could get cooking beans from them, but not seed. Isn’t it the same?

In Canada, heritageharvestseed.com sell heritage pinto seeds (Ga Ga Hut Pinto and Frijol de Seco Pinto). I am pretty certain rareseeds.com would also sell them. I searched pinto on their website and came up with Bolita Bean.

Does it matter what type of bean you can dry? Does it have to be a ‘dry bean’ variety? I think one of my pole bean is blue lake and was wondering if I could dry and use in soup? Any thoughts? Thanks lots – Hey that rhymes

I haven’t grown my own beans, but I use dry beans all the time. I usually process two pounds at a time in my crockpot with plain water and then freeze them in two cup packages so I can pull them out and use them in soup, chili, pot pie, mexican foods, etc. I usually get about 10 cups out of a 2 pound bag of dry beans. I make up white beans, black beans, red beans, and then I also make homemade baked beans using my Gram’s recipe which calls for yellow eye beans. It all goes in the freezer and allows me to avoid using canned beans. It’s super cheap and easy!

I am so new at this gardening thing that I am almost embarrassed to ask some of my questions. I buy dried pintos, kidney beans and white beans (Great Northerns and navy beans), and I realize they have to come from somewhere, but never gave it much thought. What to you plant to get these? Can you plant the bean you bought from the store? I just went to the Botanical Interests website and put in ‘kidney bean’ and could swear I heard this machine laugh at me. What do I plant?

We are going to try this for the 2014 growing season. When you pick the beans that have been dried on the vine, do you have to dry them again indoors, or just freeze them for a bit before you store them? I am getting conflicting information and am confused now. You just freeze yours right?